I wouldn't be surprised though, Palm and Apple are friendly - both stand by the Motorola 68k (sometimes for seemingly cultural reasons) and both follow a bare essentials only, highly usable philosophy of application development.
A) You can't really go comparing 802.11b with unlimited wireless access in just about any major metropolitan area. The service is aimed at executives, and that's where they usually are.
B) As nice as the Verizon service is, it doesn't offer nearly the covereage palm.net does. If you travel to varying metropolitan areas around the country, you'll quickly realize its limitations.
C) Palm is aimed at a different market, definitely not the tech crowd. I doubt it'll run Netscape anytime soon. Palm aims to offer the bare essentials, and in a *usable* way. And they do it well. I see Palm and Apple having similar ideologies, both are misunderstood by many techies around the world. When the market (not the geeks) ups the ante on what the bare essentials are, palm will follow.
Granted though, is that the damn thing is over priced. But considering the business market it's aiming to cover, they'll get $450 a piece, and without complaint.
On a side note - a parent post to this one said the service costs $50 a month. Poppycock! Go read Palm's site first. $40 a month for monthly billing and $35 a month for a one year contract. Not terrible for what you get.
There is currently one compact flash based 802.11b nic out there, and it's made by Symbol Technologies. As far as I know it's the only way to keep your PDA compact and have LAN connectivity.
[palmos/pocketpc rant]At first these things only worked on PocketPC but Handera technologies has just released a driver for PalmOS, though unfortunately the Handera 330 is the only PalmOS device with a compact flash slot. Palm really needs to do something about this and their tardiness in getting faster hardware to market. Their secure digital connector doesn't seem to be going anywhere and the current 200Mhz PocketPCs will be using 300-400Mhz Intel made StrongARM processors next year while Motorla won't have it's 200Mhz StrongARM processors ready till q3 2002. I know Palm likes Motorola but they have to ditch them if they can't keep up, the Intel processors are also PalmOS 5 compatible.[/rant]
Anywho, Symbol has been very nice in that they have a developer kit for OEM manufacturers to develop drivers for their hardware and it's available here. This Linux PDA company should invest what is relatively a couple bucks in the kit and develop drivers, Symbol has done a good part of the work already and being wirless capable would increase geek appeal, which seems to be a considerable part of the market for this thing. Imagine walking around the house and using your PDA as a remote for everything, especially for queueing up mp3s, obsessively checking email, controlling x10 devices via a server, starting your car, etc.. A wireless PDA adds a lot of potential to the geek dream of building a truly networked, automated household.
I'd like to set my private dns server to resolve them to 127.0.0.1 - I am especially interested in the kazaa one, since I use morpheus. I've already redirected sites like auto.search.msn.com, since every incorrectly url typed into IE is sent there.
Ask anyone selling hardware now how the market is and they'll tell you it's damn tough, be it Dell or the corner shop. Profit margin's have steadily declined as competition among manufacturers and quality has increased. Machines after IBM's PS1 and PS2 lines were made mostly by subcontractors and were poorly built. They had this coming, especially with the way the market has gone. It's a good thing they kept the Thinkpads in-house, their still my favorite laptop by far.
I noticed some people asking basic questions like if RFID is wireless. RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) is inherently wireless, it works on the same principal our AC power transformers use. There is a coil inside the bill that is a certain number of turns. It is energized by a high energy coil placed where the bill needs to be tracked. The high energy coil induces a current in the bill's coil and causes it to modulate a unique stream of bits on a preset frequency. It's pretty nifty technology, it never needs batteries and will work indefinitely.
And oh, I almost forgot this one. Microsoft is working with Corel? Overload. Cannot compute. Has the world gone bannanas? I guess there are no hard feelings about MS quite intentionally running DR DOS into the ground. Or from that lawsuit last year when MS representatives worked out a deal with the Labor department to sell them Office instead of Wordperfect even before bids began. I guess $135 million can make anyone change their tune though.
"Pshaaw! What anti-competitive practices! Please! Come on in and have a seat Bill! Can I offer you a drink? A cigar? My dignity?"
This is capitalism at its worst and we need some regulation here, except our government is in cahoots with this parasite, oblivious that it too is a victim. Special interests sure as hell have thrown our system off balance and we're slowly starting to spiral. We better fix this before we spin out of control.
Microsoft protects C#, Sun can't protect Java?
on
C#, CLI Accepted by ECMA
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
"Microsoft is working on its own version of.Net building blocks for the FreeBSD version of Unix with help from Corel. But that version of.Net for FreeBSD will be released under a "shared source" license that lets researchers see and modify underlying source code but not use it in commercial projects.
...
More than two years ago, Sun said it would turn Java over to the same standards body, but withdrew its proposal on fears that it would lose control of Java's evolution. Java proponents argued that making Java an industry standard would give other companies a much stronger position in defining Java and determining the direction of the software. But Sun executives implied that standardizing through ECMA could result in a version of Java that worked differently from Sun's. "
What's wrong with this picture? How come Sun couldn't come up with similar licensing to control Java? I bet Microsoft sure as hell will maintain control over C#. What does ECMA approval mean, do they take over administering rules for the standard? Sun sure made it sound that way when they didn't submit Java.
And what is this new "shared source" licensing? Microsoft asking for free pseudo-open source programming services? Wasn't open source founded on the principle of protecting authors of free software from this very kind of commercial exploitation? This is too ironic.
The college republicans at my school did program a few months ago on conservative references in the Simpsons and on how Matt Groening is a big conservative. Obviously they were trying to take advantage of the shows popularity to recruit. Unfortunately I missed this, but am still curious what the hell they were talking about. The Simpsons seem pretty liberal to me, considering the issues I've seen the show touch upon. Any ideas?
Ten million lines of code ? Holly molly... instead of wasting your time on making linux run windows apps, why dont you make better *LINUX* apps for LINUX ?
Looks like their trying to fight fire with fire, using Microsoft's own tactics against them. This is a bad move in my opinion. Microsoft will typically buy up a competitor's technology or simply take up open technologies like Kerberos. The Linux movement doesn't have the resources to fight this way, it'll take ten times the resources to reverse engineer what they need instead of buying it up. This poster is correct in saying to keep the focus on Linux. Plus, why adopt Microsoft's questionable ethics?
First of all I have question. What makes a fluke DMM or oscilloscope better than the no-name brands?
Also, the poster sounded like he wanted something cheap. Labjack is $99 and reads at 8Khz, storing the results over time. It's an external box that connects to a PC via USB. It is not really an oscilliscope, but it's also not bad for someone like me - I'm not very electronics saavy but I want to get into microcontrollers. It can trace even the fastest serial communications I'll be doing, so it's great for debugging.
8 Single-Ended, 4 Differential 12-Bit Analog Inputs
±10 Volt Analog Input Range
PGA with Gains of 1, 2, 4, 5, 8, 10, 16, or 20 V/V
Up to 8 kSamples/Sec (Burst) or 1.2 kSamples/Second (Stream)
Supports Software or Hardware Timed Acquisition
Supports Triggered Acquisition
2 Analog Outputs
20 Digital I/O (Up to 50 Hz per I/O)
32-Bit Counter
Watchdog Timer Function
Easy to Use Plug-and-Play USB Device
Connect Up to 80 LabJacks to One USB Port
Complete Software Control, No Jumpers or Switches
My understanding is that the line out on most preamps swing as high as 4 volts. So the line in on a sound card should be able to do some decent A/D conversion, up to at least that. The microphone input your talking about is different, most cards have a separate line in which handles much higher voltages.
Wait, I should have checked the author's site first. He makes another package called Ricochet that analyzes spam. He probably uses some of the same technology.
"It (Ricochet) traces the names and addresses of the systems where the spam originated from along with the servers that provide domain name resolution services to these systems (in most cases their ISPs). Then it collects/generates a list of email addresses of tech/billing/admin/abuse contacts of these system and mails them a complaint and a copy of the spam. "
Most spam I get these days have URLs with unique ID's encoded in them, so they know which email address brought in the user. You'd think this would screw up the hash.
And with this statement you make the assumption that individual freedom is a better choice than all the others - this is a product of US society not a universal constant. Democracy (much like communism) is about the power of many over the power of few.
Absolute personal freedom is anarchy (personal responsibility) not democracy.
I did? I said there is a paradox, this means there must be a balance between personal freedom and benefit to society. Like most, this is not a black and white issue. You can't have one without stepping some on the other. I am saying that RMS's idea is in one extreme corner, where benefit to society largely if not completely outweighs personal freedom when the two clash. The problem is both extremes require a utoptian society, so we need to strike a balance between personal freedom and societal benefit. You missed the point and put words in my mouth, I do not always support individual freedom over societal freedom, it depends on the particular case.
Absolute personal freedom is anarchy (personal responsibility) not democracy
Are you equating anarchy and personal responsability? Anarchy is absolute personal freedom but it doesn't work without personal responsbility; they are not the same thing, one makes the other work. Maybe in a utopia everyone would be personally responsible, but we live far from such a state. Find me some real solutions and spare me the senseless ideological bs.
Huh? Where did you get this? My feeling is that you're just trying to brand an idea a religion, (read up on the definition, and I think you'll see the error in this) so that you can slag it. That's what we call a strawman argument.
Isn't religion blind faith in some *definition* not proven by observation (i.e. empirical evidence via the scientific method)? And your telling us to read up on the definition of free software? Can you prove to us that the free software definition is the *right* way to license software? It sounds to me like that would require some more unprovable definitions.
The problem I see here is you guys think it's absolutely correct to be ideologically utilitarian. What's best for society, kill one innocent man to prevent the death of a thousand or do nothing and let the thousand die? This is the paradox of utilitarianism, you will always have to step on some individual freedoms to ensure maximum benefit to society. When RMS is saying an individual doesn't have the right to use his/her own license, he is choosing to kill the one innocent man for the thousand. In doing this he is also assuming that free licenses are better for society. In non-capitalistic society - yes, but that's not what we live in. If he wants to try some form of utilitarian rule, maybe someone should point out to him that it doesn't really work, we don't live in a utopia and that's why communism failed. Being utilitarian has never been proven as the "right" way to go about doing something either, as the paradox shows.
I remember a couple of years ago \. posted an article on how a company filed a lawsuit against the creator of an ebonics translator page and won. It took existing pages and "ebonified" them. The plantiff claimed copyright infringement when the tool was used on their particular page. Anyone remember this? It seems relevant to this new case.
Funny you mention the strike. I had a mid-tower machine shipped around the same time from Maryland to New York. The top of the tower was bent in from the center all the way down to the floppy in the shape of a V. It takes an incredible amount of force to do that - I still wonder how that possibly could have happend. Fortunately UPS did pay for the damages though. Still it was a pain waiting ~3 weeks to get a new computer.
"In fact, there's a very virtuous cycle where people do free things, some people find that adequate, sometimes companies will take that work and turn it into commercial products, those companies will hire people, pay taxes. And so you see the free software and the commercial software existing together.
There is a particular approach that breaks the cycle called the GPL that is not worth getting into today, but I don't think there is much awareness about how so-called free software foundations designed that to break that cycle."
Bill is implying that GPL is an affront to the American system by saying companies hire people and pay taxes, as if something is wrong with GPL because it doesn't. The American system is for capitalism, but also for free speech and thus the open exchange of ideas. We need to strike a *balance*, not just put down anything non-capitalistic in nature. This line of thinking is simple minded and would be ludicrous if it weren't so dangerous.
He says GPL was "designed" to break the cycle where people develop free software then enhanced commercial software is developed on that free base. This shows again shows Bill is a bit delusional, I don't get the impression that GPL was created to destroy business, but to protect from exploitation the systems that hard working volounteers have built. Bill's cycle sounds awefully familiar:
A company develops innovative software, Microsoft borrows it, and then runs them out of business.
Microsoft borrows kerberos, "extends it", and makes renders it non-interoperable with existing implementations.
Numerous other examples can be cited. *shrug* I think Bill will need some therapy before we see any honest attempts at change.
Why even ask the terrorism question? It's a cross between being off-topic and trolling. Why don't you try answering the question, then it might become a little more obvious how senseless and inappropriate it is.
"Gee, terrorists might be able to hit buildings faster! Ack! Oh no! Wait, no, would the force of a scramjet be enough to breach a nuclear power plant? What if a terrorist took a scramjet, flew to space and took out an important satellite?"
The available answers are either obvious, or lead to chicken-headed questions that we only have speculative answers for, considering the scramjet is experimental and few individuals are intimately familiar with it. Either way, the question spreads FUD. Come on people.. Someone mod this down please!
Hrmm.. Water is pretty viscous compared to air, there would have a lot of extra resistance from it. The pointed, aerodynamic (hydrodynamic?) shape of a missile helps it get away with this, but a plane would undergo much resistance and therefore stress trying to launch from of the ocean. For underwater launches, they'd have to balance the design of the exterior with something that'd encounter minimal resistance from water. Their probably having enough trouble getting the shape right so the thing works well in the air.
I think what he wants is direct access to the bits that contol the port. ReadFile and WriteFile will stream data in and out of the parallel port using the standard protocol, but won't allow control at the pin level.
Likely, even more of us own this reader than the mousepad reader. American Express gave them out for free with their blue cards. Has anyone hacked it yet? The device looks fairly simple and the smartcard follows the ISO standard for layout. These are the same cards(physically) as those used in DTV receivers and other smartcard apps. They even sell blank cards with embedded microcontrollers that can be programmed in assembly or C. The cards do serial input and output, and when power is applied the stored program springs to life and talks via the TX/RX contact on the card. The cards can even be locked so the code inside isn't extractable. Someone could easily write code to do some serious key based authentication. If the American Express readers could be hacked to read and write the cards this could be cheaply accessible to all of us. Not to mention it'd be a great way to get people into microcontoller coding and all the neat associated applications.
Is there a place where I can find basic information on dynamically loading classes and libraries? This is something I have wanted to do for a project, but I don't know where to start. I want to be able to dynamically add data stream sources at runtime, where each data stream is accessed by the same interface, regardless of the source, be it network TCP/IP, serial, file, etc... I'd imagine the necessary "plugins" would have to be linked to the main code at runtime. Sounds a little tricky to me. Preferrably a web site or a book suggestion would be great.
Slashdot Mirror
Which hardware would they be modeling after? There were pics of this thing published last summer on cnet, so I wouldn't say the ipod.
Check it out here.
I wouldn't be surprised though, Palm and Apple are friendly - both stand by the Motorola 68k (sometimes for seemingly cultural reasons) and both follow a bare essentials only, highly usable philosophy of application development.
A) You can't really go comparing 802.11b with unlimited wireless access in just about any major metropolitan area. The service is aimed at executives, and that's where they usually are.
B) As nice as the Verizon service is, it doesn't offer nearly the covereage palm.net does. If you travel to varying metropolitan areas around the country, you'll quickly realize its limitations.
C) Palm is aimed at a different market, definitely not the tech crowd. I doubt it'll run Netscape anytime soon. Palm aims to offer the bare essentials, and in a *usable* way. And they do it well. I see Palm and Apple having similar ideologies, both are misunderstood by many techies around the world. When the market (not the geeks) ups the ante on what the bare essentials are, palm will follow.
Granted though, is that the damn thing is over priced. But considering the business market it's aiming to cover, they'll get $450 a piece, and without complaint.
On a side note - a parent post to this one said the service costs $50 a month. Poppycock! Go read Palm's site first. $40 a month for monthly billing and $35 a month for a one year contract. Not terrible for what you get.
There is currently one compact flash based 802.11b nic out there, and it's made by Symbol Technologies. As far as I know it's the only way to keep your PDA compact and have LAN connectivity.
[palmos/pocketpc rant]At first these things only worked on PocketPC but Handera technologies has just released a driver for PalmOS, though unfortunately the Handera 330 is the only PalmOS device with a compact flash slot. Palm really needs to do something about this and their tardiness in getting faster hardware to market. Their secure digital connector doesn't seem to be going anywhere and the current 200Mhz PocketPCs will be using 300-400Mhz Intel made StrongARM processors next year while Motorla won't have it's 200Mhz StrongARM processors ready till q3 2002. I know Palm likes Motorola but they have to ditch them if they can't keep up, the Intel processors are also PalmOS 5 compatible.[/rant]
Anywho, Symbol has been very nice in that they have a developer kit for OEM manufacturers to develop drivers for their hardware and it's available here. This Linux PDA company should invest what is relatively a couple bucks in the kit and develop drivers, Symbol has done a good part of the work already and being wirless capable would increase geek appeal, which seems to be a considerable part of the market for this thing. Imagine walking around the house and using your PDA as a remote for everything, especially for queueing up mp3s, obsessively checking email, controlling x10 devices via a server, starting your car, etc.. A wireless PDA adds a lot of potential to the geek dream of building a truly networked, automated household.
I'd like to set my private dns server to resolve them to 127.0.0.1 - I am especially interested in the kazaa one, since I use morpheus. I've already redirected sites like auto.search.msn.com, since every incorrectly url typed into IE is sent there.
Ask anyone selling hardware now how the market is and they'll tell you it's damn tough, be it Dell or the corner shop. Profit margin's have steadily declined as competition among manufacturers and quality has increased. Machines after IBM's PS1 and PS2 lines were made mostly by subcontractors and were poorly built. They had this coming, especially with the way the market has gone. It's a good thing they kept the Thinkpads in-house, their still my favorite laptop by far.
I noticed some people asking basic questions like if RFID is wireless. RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) is inherently wireless, it works on the same principal our AC power transformers use. There is a coil inside the bill that is a certain number of turns. It is energized by a high energy coil placed where the bill needs to be tracked. The high energy coil induces a current in the bill's coil and causes it to modulate a unique stream of bits on a preset frequency. It's pretty nifty technology, it never needs batteries and will work indefinitely.
And oh, I almost forgot this one. Microsoft is working with Corel? Overload. Cannot compute. Has the world gone bannanas? I guess there are no hard feelings about MS quite intentionally running DR DOS into the ground. Or from that lawsuit last year when MS representatives worked out a deal with the Labor department to sell them Office instead of Wordperfect even before bids began. I guess $135 million can make anyone change their tune though.
"Pshaaw! What anti-competitive practices! Please! Come on in and have a seat Bill! Can I offer you a drink? A cigar? My dignity?"
This is capitalism at its worst and we need some regulation here, except our government is in cahoots with this parasite, oblivious that it too is a victim. Special interests sure as hell have thrown our system off balance and we're slowly starting to spiral. We better fix this before we spin out of control.
What's wrong with this picture? How come Sun couldn't come up with similar licensing to control Java? I bet Microsoft sure as hell will maintain control over C#. What does ECMA approval mean, do they take over administering rules for the standard? Sun sure made it sound that way when they didn't submit Java.
And what is this new "shared source" licensing? Microsoft asking for free pseudo-open source programming services? Wasn't open source founded on the principle of protecting authors of free software from this very kind of commercial exploitation? This is too ironic.
The college republicans at my school did program a few months ago on conservative references in the Simpsons and on how Matt Groening is a big conservative. Obviously they were trying to take advantage of the shows popularity to recruit. Unfortunately I missed this, but am still curious what the hell they were talking about. The Simpsons seem pretty liberal to me, considering the issues I've seen the show touch upon. Any ideas?
Looks like their trying to fight fire with fire, using Microsoft's own tactics against them. This is a bad move in my opinion. Microsoft will typically buy up a competitor's technology or simply take up open technologies like Kerberos. The Linux movement doesn't have the resources to fight this way, it'll take ten times the resources to reverse engineer what they need instead of buying it up. This poster is correct in saying to keep the focus on Linux. Plus, why adopt Microsoft's questionable ethics?
First of all I have question. What makes a fluke DMM or oscilloscope better than the no-name brands?
Also, the poster sounded like he wanted something cheap. Labjack is $99 and reads at 8Khz, storing the results over time. It's an external box that connects to a PC via USB. It is not really an oscilliscope, but it's also not bad for someone like me - I'm not very electronics saavy but I want to get into microcontrollers. It can trace even the fastest serial communications I'll be doing, so it's great for debugging.
8 Single-Ended, 4 Differential 12-Bit Analog Inputs
±10 Volt Analog Input Range
PGA with Gains of 1, 2, 4, 5, 8, 10, 16, or 20 V/V
Up to 8 kSamples/Sec (Burst) or 1.2 kSamples/Second (Stream)
Supports Software or Hardware Timed Acquisition
Supports Triggered Acquisition
2 Analog Outputs
20 Digital I/O (Up to 50 Hz per I/O)
32-Bit Counter
Watchdog Timer Function
Easy to Use Plug-and-Play USB Device
Connect Up to 80 LabJacks to One USB Port
Complete Software Control, No Jumpers or Switches
Labjack
My understanding is that the line out on most preamps swing as high as 4 volts. So the line in on a sound card should be able to do some decent A/D conversion, up to at least that. The microphone input your talking about is different, most cards have a separate line in which handles much higher voltages.
Wait, I should have checked the author's site first. He makes another package called Ricochet that analyzes spam. He probably uses some of the same technology.
"It (Ricochet) traces the names and addresses of the systems where the spam originated from along with the servers that provide domain name resolution services to these systems (in most cases their ISPs). Then it collects/generates a list of email addresses of tech/billing/admin/abuse contacts of these system and mails them a complaint and a copy of the spam. "
Ricochet Website
I bet he uses some of the same techniques as in the Ricochet app, by involving the spam header when generating the hash.
Most spam I get these days have URLs with unique ID's encoded in them, so they know which email address brought in the user. You'd think this would screw up the hash.
And with this statement you make the assumption that individual freedom is a better choice than all the others - this is a product of US society not a universal constant. Democracy (much like communism) is about the power of many over the power of few.
Absolute personal freedom is anarchy (personal responsibility) not democracy.
I did? I said there is a paradox, this means there must be a balance between personal freedom and benefit to society. Like most, this is not a black and white issue. You can't have one without stepping some on the other. I am saying that RMS's idea is in one extreme corner, where benefit to society largely if not completely outweighs personal freedom when the two clash. The problem is both extremes require a utoptian society, so we need to strike a balance between personal freedom and societal benefit. You missed the point and put words in my mouth, I do not always support individual freedom over societal freedom, it depends on the particular case.
Absolute personal freedom is anarchy (personal responsibility) not democracy
Are you equating anarchy and personal responsability? Anarchy is absolute personal freedom but it doesn't work without personal responsbility; they are not the same thing, one makes the other work. Maybe in a utopia everyone would be personally responsible, but we live far from such a state. Find me some real solutions and spare me the senseless ideological bs.
Huh? Where did you get this? My feeling is that you're just trying to brand an idea a religion, (read up on the definition, and I think you'll see the error in this) so that you can slag it. That's what we call a strawman argument.
Isn't religion blind faith in some *definition* not proven by observation (i.e. empirical evidence via the scientific method)? And your telling us to read up on the definition of free software? Can you prove to us that the free software definition is the *right* way to license software? It sounds to me like that would require some more unprovable definitions.
The problem I see here is you guys think it's absolutely correct to be ideologically utilitarian. What's best for society, kill one innocent man to prevent the death of a thousand or do nothing and let the thousand die? This is the paradox of utilitarianism, you will always have to step on some individual freedoms to ensure maximum benefit to society. When RMS is saying an individual doesn't have the right to use his/her own license, he is choosing to kill the one innocent man for the thousand. In doing this he is also assuming that free licenses are better for society. In non-capitalistic society - yes, but that's not what we live in. If he wants to try some form of utilitarian rule, maybe someone should point out to him that it doesn't really work, we don't live in a utopia and that's why communism failed. Being utilitarian has never been proven as the "right" way to go about doing something either, as the paradox shows.
I remember a couple of years ago \. posted an article on how a company filed a lawsuit against the creator of an ebonics translator page and won. It took existing pages and "ebonified" them. The plantiff claimed copyright infringement when the tool was used on their particular page. Anyone remember this? It seems relevant to this new case.
Funny you mention the strike. I had a mid-tower machine shipped around the same time from Maryland to New York. The top of the tower was bent in from the center all the way down to the floppy in the shape of a V. It takes an incredible amount of force to do that - I still wonder how that possibly could have happend. Fortunately UPS did pay for the damages though. Still it was a pain waiting ~3 weeks to get a new computer.
What does speaking english have to do with enroute package handling? This sounds hrmm.. ethnocentric.
"In fact, there's a very virtuous cycle where people do free things, some people find that adequate, sometimes companies will take that work and turn it into commercial products, those companies will hire people, pay taxes. And so you see the free software and the commercial software existing together.
There is a particular approach that breaks the cycle called the GPL that is not worth getting into today, but I don't think there is much awareness about how so-called free software foundations designed that to break that cycle."
Bill is implying that GPL is an affront to the American system by saying companies hire people and pay taxes, as if something is wrong with GPL because it doesn't. The American system is for capitalism, but also for free speech and thus the open exchange of ideas. We need to strike a *balance*, not just put down anything non-capitalistic in nature. This line of thinking is simple minded and would be ludicrous if it weren't so dangerous.
He says GPL was "designed" to break the cycle where people develop free software then enhanced commercial software is developed on that free base. This shows again shows Bill is a bit delusional, I don't get the impression that GPL was created to destroy business, but to protect from exploitation the systems that hard working volounteers have built. Bill's cycle sounds awefully familiar:
A company develops innovative software, Microsoft borrows it, and then runs them out of business.
Microsoft borrows kerberos, "extends it", and makes renders it non-interoperable with existing implementations.
Numerous other examples can be cited. *shrug* I think Bill will need some therapy before we see any honest attempts at change.
Why even ask the terrorism question? It's a cross between being off-topic and trolling. Why don't you try answering the question, then it might become a little more obvious how senseless and inappropriate it is.
"Gee, terrorists might be able to hit buildings faster! Ack! Oh no! Wait, no, would the force of a scramjet be enough to breach a nuclear power plant? What if a terrorist took a scramjet, flew to space and took out an important satellite?"
The available answers are either obvious, or lead to chicken-headed questions that we only have speculative answers for, considering the scramjet is experimental and few individuals are intimately familiar with it. Either way, the question spreads FUD. Come on people.. Someone mod this down please!
Hrmm.. Water is pretty viscous compared to air, there would have a lot of extra resistance from it. The pointed, aerodynamic (hydrodynamic?) shape of a missile helps it get away with this, but a plane would undergo much resistance and therefore stress trying to launch from of the ocean. For underwater launches, they'd have to balance the design of the exterior with something that'd encounter minimal resistance from water. Their probably having enough trouble getting the shape right so the thing works well in the air.
I think what he wants is direct access to the bits that contol the port. ReadFile and WriteFile will stream data in and out of the parallel port using the standard protocol, but won't allow control at the pin level.
Likely, even more of us own this reader than the mousepad reader. American Express gave them out for free with their blue cards. Has anyone hacked it yet? The device looks fairly simple and the smartcard follows the ISO standard for layout. These are the same cards(physically) as those used in DTV receivers and other smartcard apps. They even sell blank cards with embedded microcontrollers that can be programmed in assembly or C. The cards do serial input and output, and when power is applied the stored program springs to life and talks via the TX/RX contact on the card. The cards can even be locked so the code inside isn't extractable. Someone could easily write code to do some serious key based authentication. If the American Express readers could be hacked to read and write the cards this could be cheaply accessible to all of us. Not to mention it'd be a great way to get people into microcontoller coding and all the neat associated applications.
Is there a place where I can find basic information on dynamically loading classes and libraries? This is something I have wanted to do for a project, but I don't know where to start. I want to be able to dynamically add data stream sources at runtime, where each data stream is accessed by the same interface, regardless of the source, be it network TCP/IP, serial, file, etc... I'd imagine the necessary "plugins" would have to be linked to the main code at runtime. Sounds a little tricky to me. Preferrably a web site or a book suggestion would be great.